Friday, June 27, 2014

Outside of it's white, American male, un or under educated, age 50-80 prime demographic, it's pretty well known that Fox "News" is a fucking laughingstock when it comes to journalistic integrity.

Call The Gadfly a prophet if you must, but he doesn't think that this caliber of programming is going to help them rehabilitate that learned viewpoint as well as well as the tattered shreds that remain of their credibility:

Fox News' upcoming investigative report on the growing crisis in Iraq will feature Iraq War architect Dick Cheney blaming President Obama for the turmoil there.

The special, Iraq and the Rise of a Terrorist State, is set to air on June 27 and will examine the current state of Iraq as "al Qaeda threatens to take over." The report will also feature former Vice President Dick Cheney in order to add his commentary on "who says he knows who is to blame: President Barack Obama":

Allow The Gadfly to put Fox's using Dick Cheney as a subject matter expert on what went wrong in Iraq in it's proper context . . . . . imagine CNN asking Cliven Bundy to expound upon the legalities of using publicly owned land to run and graze a privately owned, huge herd of cattle on? . . . . Yeah -- you get the picture huh?

Fox "News" couldn't humiliate themselves even more it seems, so apparently their take is - why the fuck not bring on Cheney to blame Obama for Iraq - we're already a joke - might as well cement the reputation for posterity.

WASHINGTON -- Political opponents accuse each other of lying all the time, but one Oklahoma congressional candidate took his accusation to a new level this week when he claimed his opponent was actually dead and being represented by a body double.

KFOR in Oklahoma reports that Timothy Ray Murray believes Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), his opponent in the congressional Republican primary, was executed three years ago and is being represented by a look-alike. Because he believes Lucas is really dead, Murray said he will challenge the results of Tuesday's Republican primary, in which Murray received 5.2 percent of the vote. Lucas won the primary with 82.8 percent of the vote.

"It is widely known Rep. Frank D. Lucas is no longer alive and has been displayed by a look alike. Rep. Lucas’ look alike was depicted as sentenced on a white stage in southern Ukraine on or about Jan. 11, 2011," Murray said in a statement posted on his campaign website. The statement claimed Lucas and “a few other” members of Congress from Oklahoma and other states were shown on television being hanged by “The World Court.”

From Homecoming Queen to graduate, Hailie Jade Scott Mathers sure did make the most of her time at Chippewa Valley High. She recently graduated from the school in Clinton Township, Michigan with honors, which we’re sure made her mom, Kimberly Scott, and dad, Eminem (Marshall Mathers), proud.

Nick Hanauer is a self-made billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist.

Nick Hanauer listens to and converses with his fellow Americans and actually gives a shit about them and their economic plight.

Nick Hanauer is sending a stark warning in an op-ed in Politico Magazine to his fellow billionaire plutocrats -- stop trying to destroy the middle class and stop hoarding the wealth.

Nick Hanauer is a pretty fucking astute guy for recognizing the root cause of the disease that is rotting America's soul to it's core and having the balls to write about it in a national media outlet.

Observe Hanauer's note to his fellow tycoons:

But let’s speak frankly to each other. I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?

I see pitchforks.

At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.

But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.

And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Go to the link and read the whole thing, you'll be infinitely better informed for doing so.

Many of you longtime readers of The Gadfly's shitty little blog will instantly recognize Nick Hanauer's warning to the plutocrats. It's because it is the very same warning that, not only The Gadfly, but many other dirty hippies have been attempting to get people to pay attention to in the years since the 2008 economic collapse.

And it's not because The Gadfly, as Hanauer denotes about his self, is smarter -- it's because The Gadfly can recognize fundamental unfairness when it's staring him straight in the goddamn face. The Gadfly can decipher fairly uncomplicated economic statistics which show a frighteningly and rapidly increasing imbalance of wealth taking place across the country. And The Gadfly knows just enough about the history of human economic development along with the causes that have motivated peoples from varied parts of the planet to rise up and throw off the shackles of oligarchic oppression on occasion, which form his limited, but pretty accurate knowledge base of the subject.

Billionaire venture capitalist Nick Hanauer clearly sees the writing on the wall, . But with the way that the Koch Brother's subsidiary, the Tea Dummies, and their wholly retrogressive and intransigent economic policies have captured control of the GOP and their platform, The Gadfly cannot fathom how Hanauer's dark vision does not come to pass at some point in the not too distant future.

At this point, you might expect The Gadfly to make a joke about investing in pitchfork manufacturing stocks, but honestly, there isn't much that The Gadfly finds humorous about the prospect of his nation coming apart at the socio-economic seams and devolving in to just another failed empire that encounters historical doom upon the petard of it's own greed and hubris.

Better start paying attention to what's going on out there sports fanz, for if Hanauer's vision has any semblance of prescience to it, and his warning to his fellow plutocrats goes unheeded --- well, let's just say that your dream of your own contented version of the American way of life and the promise it once held, will be but a long forgotten memory to your children's children some day.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) on Wednesday objected to President Barack Obama’s immigration policies because he said that they were “luring” diseased children to the United States.

“I asked them about, ‘I hear there’s 18 cases of scabies here, where are they?’” Gohmert recalled. “Oh, you see the little red crime scene tape over here, that’s the best we can do because Health and Human Services won’t come pick up these people in a timely manner. So, they’re lying here on a concrete floor. And those 18 lying there on that concrete floor in that little area behind that crime scene tape are our scabies cases.”

“We’re still looking for all the lice cases, and the other cases, the flu cases,” he added.

Texas Republican congress-nut Louie Gohmert truly is one of the nastiest pieces of work in the GOP caucus these days -- and that is saying a lot considering he is in the incomparable company of Ted Cruz, Steve King, Michele Bachmann and James Inhofe.

Frankly speaking and with nary a pang of shame for saying so, The Gadfly frequently fantasizes about meeting that little turd brain piece of human shit Gohmert in a dark alley some day. The Gadfly would introduce Louie's shriveled scrotum sac promptly to the swiftly delivered steel-toe of one of his size 10 motorcycle boots so fast that the hairless little cretin would probably instantaneously expire just from the act of sucking so much air, so rapidly into his lungs that they would explode, as the reaction to having his family jewels pulverized to micro dust in the blink of an eye.

These immigrant kids, who are mostly from Central America, and who are in U.S. custody, are making an incredibly harrowing journey to get to America, and they are not at fault for the predicament they find themselves in. You can thank three plus decades of conservative foreign policy mischief making and support of right wing tyrants in those nations for turning those kid's homelands into present day living hell holes. And so for Gohmert to use these children as his ratfucking weapon of choice to beat up on Obama, it is a much greater statement on his own worthless and soulless existence in this world that we all live in, than it is about the character or health condition of the immigrant kids.

And not to put too fine of a point on it, but scabies is a fairly easily curable skin disease. On the other hand, science has yet to discover a cure for the disease of slack-jawed ignorance, punch-in-the-face inducing stupidity, and hateful cruelty which infects that unrecognizable glop of mush which passes for a brain and the burned chunk of soot-black coal that passes as a soul in the Louie Gohmerts of this country. So take that for what it's worth.

Btw -- Louie neglected to mention a fact which he very well knows -- namely that Obama has deported more illegal immigrants than any president in history. Which signifies quite plainly then that his scorn really is aimed at the little brown skinned kids after all, and that just proves beyond any doubt that he is a scum sucking, pea-headed piece of shit with a lousy physique, whose views are not in the least bit deserving of one single ounce of respect or attentive deference.

In fact --- just so that there's no ambiguity as to what The Gadfly's opinion of Louie Gohmert as a human being is, here's a little ditty that The Gadfly would like to dedicate to the shit-for-brains little geek from Texas -- along with those who support and think like him . . . . .

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Lol! . . . Poor John Boehner and the old guard Republican establishment.

They are so fucking achingly pathetic these days that they practically have The Gadfly feeling random pangs of sympathy for them.

The GOP has the Tea Bagger Rottweilers tearing them a new asshole from behind and they have Obama out in front of them telling them to go pound sand and somewhere in the squishy middle they have a shrinking, monolithic constituency that is so discombobulated by all of it to the extent that recent polling shows the current GOP led Congress with the lowest approval ratings in history -- lower than Dick Cheney's scrotum sac even.

And just exactly how is John Boehner handling all of that adversity?

Well -- Boehner has announced that he wants to sue Obama --- and for what reason do you think Mr. Boehner wishes to sue Mr. Obama for dear readers?

Take a peek . . . . :

House Speaker John Boehner announced Wednesday he plans to file suit against President Obama over his alleged abuse of executive power.

"This is not about impeachment -- it's about him faithfully executing the laws of this country," Boehner said.

The speaker alleged that the president not only has ignored the law but "brags about it," decrying what he described as "arrogance and incompetence."

That's right -- "arrogance." And no - The Gadfly did not forget the "incompetence" part - he just refuses to allow someone who presided over a GOP who allowed one of the most incompetent Presidents in history, GW Bush, run roughshod over the constitution and fuck up a prosperous, peaceful nation that had been handed to him by his predecessor. As such, Boehner can in no way whatsoever be considered a subject matter expert on the issue of executive competency.

But apparently Boehner has been spending way too much time in morning coffee klatches with the Tea Party caucus these days being hypnotized by their Obama ratfucking zealotry and their enthusiasm for sticking a knife in the back of any American constituency that doesn't bow to their own brand of arrogance and cruelty.

Btw - let's get something clear right off the get go here - the term "arrogance" as used in the context of Boehner's hissy fit, really is just a big old tootin' dog whistle for "uppity nigger." You know it, The Gadfly knows it, so let's make certain that we analyze this lawsuit monkey business in the context of that bit of obviousness.

And one other thing -- since when did "arrogance" become a constitutional offence? Shit - if you ask The Gadfly, that's probably what the British were saying about America's founding fathers when they created the constitution in 1787 - "those bloody little arrogant shits!!" . . . .

Nonetheless, The Gadfly surmises that Boehner truly has nothing of substance or prideful value to show for his decades of government service these days, so he might just as well impart the services of his sorry ass as nursemaid to the rat fucking Tea Party. Beats being dumped in to the dust bin of political irrelevancy by your own tribe one might suppose.

Any way you look at it though, it's a sad, desperate, and cynical spectacle - albeit one suited to the party, and the man, who allowed the arrogant and incompetent Teabagger brats to come along and bitch slap them in to timid submissiveness.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

This is the best goddamn thing you dear readers will feast your weary eyes upon for some time.

Charlie Pierce over at Esquire sums up very succinctly, just how the black-hearted fuckery of a certain faction of citizens in this country is making American life miserable not only for those whom they disagree with ideologically and politically, but also, ironically, for themselves and those who support them.

After reading this, The Gadfly could not determine whether he want to cry tears of lamentation for the truth of what Pierce is saying about the vein of cruelty running through our society, tears of joy because the message conveyed is one that has been long overdue for being published in a national media venue, or tears of jealousy because The Gadfly knows that his own capabilities of putting such forcefully poetic sincerity in written form are vastly inferior to those of Sir Charles Pierce.

Anyhow, The Gadfly feels this piece is worth printing in it's entirety on the pages of his shitty little blog. Read it, understand it, share it, and then make a morally inspired decision to get involved and do something about it.

Here u go . . . . The Gadfly will highlight a few excerpts that stood out to him for reasons of his perspective:

A while back, we noted the story of the toddler who was severely injured when, during a drug raid, a local SWAT team came busting in and someone threw a flash-bang grenade into his crib. Well, his mother has written a chilling first-hand account of what happened to her son, and to her, during their encounter with one of our insanely militarized police forces.

My husband's nephew, the one they were looking for, wasn't there. He doesn't even live in that house. After breaking down the door, throwing my husband to the ground, and screaming at my children, the officers - armed with M16s - filed through the house like they were playing war. They searched for drugs and never found any. I heard my baby wailing and asked one of the officers to let me hold him. He screamed at me to sit down and shut up and blocked my view, so I couldn't see my son. I could see a singed crib. And I could see a pool of blood. The officers yelled at me to calm down and told me my son was fine, that he'd just lost a tooth.

This didn't happen in Mosul. This didn't happen in Jalalabad. It happened in Atlanta. Keep this in mind.

There are 323,900 DWSD accounts in Detroit. Of those, 150,806 are delinquent. Some of those delinquencies are low-income customers who are struggling to keep their utilities on, said some who work in providing assistance to those in need. "The need is huge," said Mia Cupp, director of development and communications for the Wayne Metropolitan Community Action Agency. "There are families that have gone months and months without water." The group is among a handful of local agencies that provide assistance to those who need help with their water bills. The Water Access Volunteer Effort, a Detroit-based nonprofit, is another. Going without water can be dangerous, Cupp said. "You can only imagine, how do go to the bathroom? How do you take showers? How do you clean yourself?" she said. "You can't conduct the normal daily things that you would do." The organization has very limited resources. Cupp said the group raised about $148,000 during a charity walk; that money could go to helping people pay water bills.

There is a new kind of systematized cruelty in our daily lives, in how we relate to each other, and in how we treat our fellow citizens, and, therefore, there is a new kind of systematized cruelty in our politics as well. It is not as though there haven't been times in the history of our country in which cruelty was practiced for political or pecuniary advantage. It is not as though there haven't been times in our history when the circumstances in people's lives did not conspire cruelly against them, or when the various systems that influenced those lives did not conspire in their collective cruelty against their seeking any succor or relief. There was slavery, and the cruel war that ended it. There was the organized cruelty that followed Reconstruction, and the modern, grinding cruelty of the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age that followed it. There were two World Wars, the first one featuring a new era in mechanized slaughter and the second featuring a new era in industrialized genocide. There was the Great Depression. There was McCarthyism, and the cruelty that was practiced in Southeast Asia that ended up partly dehumanizing the entire country. There always has been the cruelty of poverty and disease.

But there is something different abroad in the politics now, perhaps because we are in the middle of an era of scarcity and because we have invested ourselves in a timid culture of austerity and doubt. The system seems too full now of opportunities to grind and to bully. We have politicians, most of whom will never have to work another day in their lives, making the argument seriously that there is no role in self-government for the protection and welfare of the political commonwealth as that term applies to the poorest among us. We have politicians, most of whom have gilt-edged health care plans, making the argument seriously that an insurance-friendly system of health-care reform is in some way bad for the people whom it is helping the most, and we have politicians seriously arguing that those without health-care somehow are more free than the people who have turned to their government, their self-government, for help in this area. In the wake of a horrific outbreak of violence in a Connecticut elementary school, we have enacted gun laws now that make it easier to shoot our fellow citizens and not harder to do so. Our police forces equip themselves with weapons of war and then go out and look for wars to fight. We are cheap. We are suspicious. We will shoot first, and we will do it with hearts grown cold and, yes, cruel.

We cheer for cruelty and say that we are asking for personal responsibility among those people who are not us, because the people who are not us do not deserve the same benefits of the political commonwealth that we have. In our politics, we have become masters of camouflage. We practice fiscal cruelty and call it an economy. We practice legal cruelty and call it justice. We practice environmental cruelty and call it opportunity. We practice vicarious cruelty and call it entertainment. We practice rhetorical cruelty and call it debate. We set the best instincts of ourselves in conflict with each other until they tear each other to ribbons, and until they are no longer our best instincts but something dark and bitter and corroborate with itself. And then it fights all the institutions that our best instincts once supported, all the elements of the political commonwealth that we once thought permanent, all the arguments that we once thought settled -- until there is a terrible kind of moral self-destruction that touches those institutions and leaves them soft and fragile and, eventually, evanescent. We do all these things, cruelty running through them like hot blood, and we call it our politics.

Because of that, the daily gunplay no longer surprises us. The rising rates of poverty no longer surprise us. The chaos of our lunatic public discourse no longer surprises us. We make war based on lies and deceit because cruelty is seen to be enough, seen to be the immutable law of the modern world. We make policy based on being as tough as we can on the weakest among us, because cruelty is seen to be enough, seen to be the fundamental morality behind what ultimately is merely the law of the jungle. We do all these things, cruelty running through them like a cold river, and we call it our politics.

It does not have to be this way. After the greatest exercise of systematized cruelty in the country's history, Abraham Lincoln gave the greatest speech ever given by an American president, and in its greatest passage, he called hold, enough.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

On one of the cruelest nights of 1968—which was a very cruel year; indeed, a year the cruelty of which eventually would claim his own life—Robert Kennedy stood in the dark in Indianapolis and offered a similar gathering hymn.

And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

The time for camouflage is over. Cruelty is cruelty. It should be recognized as a fundamental heresy against the political commonwealth and wrung out of all its institutions. That is the only way out.

Monday, June 23, 2014

John Cole over at the blog Balloon Juice channels The Gadfly in his observation and analysis of precisely what a steaming pile of bullshit that these national Tea Party organizations are peddling to the masses:

Screws creditors out of a half a million (and that is a bailout, dear, you aren’t in the debtor prisons like Ted Cruz and others would love to have make a comeback), accepts public assistance, and now makes 500k a year to try to do everything she can to elect people who would eliminate the safety net for people who were in her exact same position a few years ago.

The individual that Cole's observation is referring to is Jenny Beth Martin who is head of the Tea Party Patriots. Go read about her story and then tell The Gadfly that the woman isn't one of the biggest fucking phonies and hypocrites in politics today -- and that truly is saying something when one contemplates the plethora of phonies and hypocrites that populate the Democratic and Republican parties.

If anything, it is simply additional evidence that these national Tea Party organizations themselves have about as much integrity as Dick Cheney does on the subjects of honesty and morality.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

The Iraq war architect's reemergence in to the public arena to defend their own failures of vision and leadership and to now offer up "advice" to President Obama on how to deal with the current clusterfuckery in Iraq get's the Colbert treatment.

"Id say those things he's (Cheney) swinging could be 'balls of mass destruction.' Which means we have no choice but to invade Dick Cheney's sac."

The Gadfly has made the observation on many occasions -- Stephen Colbert is a national comedic treasure.

On Colbert's note - allow The Gadfly the opportunity to channel Don Rumsfeld as he attempting to bullshit the press in 2003 after the invasion and when asked where Saddam's WMD's were at. Only in The Gadfly's example, let's replace the term WMD's with the concepts of honor, integrity and morality in relation to Dick Cheney . . . .

"The Gadfly knows where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat, and if they're not there, check under Dick Cheney's scrotum sac."

Good article in Salon by Andrew O'Hehir about the destructive legacy that Dick Cheney has unceremoniously dropped at the feet of the American people with his great Iraq Adventure.

The key excerpt, and the most vital point to be taken away from O'Hehir's observation is this:

If we don’t quite know how the Iraq endgame will play out, it’s not pretty. The prospect of helicopters lifting embassy personnel off the roof, Saigon-style, does not seem terribly far away. Last week Obama announced that he would order military advisers into the country to pep up the Iraqi army, which seems to be collapsing before the Sunni insurgency. At least that’s an intriguing departure from the script: It’s like the beginning and the end of the Vietnam War at the same time! Obama must feel as if his presidency has been cursed by a malicious wizard; the principal foreign-policy pledge that got him elected, and that he more or less fulfilled, is unraveling as if by magic.

We know who the dark wizard is who cast that spell, but it’s the rest of us who granted him his power. Dick Cheney yearns to fight the Iraq war over again – or fight another and another in Iran or Syria or somewhere else – in the vain hope that things will turn out differently, America’s virility will be restored and his legacy redeemed. That’s not going to happen; rancher togs or not, the Cheney of 2014 is an old and broken man with a fading constituency. But that’s small comfort to the rest of us, not to mention the people of Iraq. He destroyed their nation, bankrupted ours and did his damnedest to transmit the toxic effects of Vietnam to a new generation. One day we’ll be free of that past, presumably, but that day has not come.

The day that America will be free of Cheney's and the neo-con's past, as cold and unfeeling as it sounds (and in this case, The Gadfly feels wholly justified in saying this), is the day that they are no longer roaming this earthly existence and plying their trade as war makers and war profiteers. To put it bluntly, when they are all dead and buried is when America has the opportunity to move on from their noxious and tragic legacy.

Ok -- so Iraq is devolving back in to their ancient tribal and religious strife.

Gee - who ever could have predicted that what was going to happen when the Bush, Cheney and the neo-cons decided to lie America in to that clusterfuck of a conflict that it was going to blow up in America's face and end in pure chaos and failure? . . . . .

That was Mr. Kotter's star student, Arnold Horshack, doing his dead-on imitation of The Gadfly, and many other dirty fucking hippies, who, not unlike the inimitable Horshack, raised their hands and told the Bushies, told the gutless media, told the slack-jawed, dumbass conservatives, and told a gullible America that invading Iraq was going to be one of the stupidest and most costly foreign policy mistakes that this country has made in it's long history of sticking it's fucking nose in to other nation's affairs.

We hippies implored the media to do their fucking jobs and thoroughly investigate the Bush administration's claims that Iraq was harboring weapons of mass destruction or that they had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks. We implored sane America to be skeptical of the claims that the Bush people were spoon-feeding a compliant and craven mainstream media, who in due course, turned around and spoon-fed the same pile of duplicitous bullshit to an emotionally scarred and uncertain U.S. public.

And for our effort at trying to spare this country the heartache of yet another bloody military debacle and failure, along the lines of Vietnam, we hippies were ominously warned to watch what we say and had our patriotism and our moral character questioned and maligned. Frankly - The Gadlfy back then, considered it a badge of honor, and does so to this day, to have scumbags like the Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz crowd, along with their cheerleaders at Fox "News," question his devotion to this country.

And as was predictable, based on all of the available, uncorrupt evidence, history has vindicated The Gadfly and his fellow dirty fucking liberal hippies. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, the neo-cons, and every Republican and Democratic politician that voted for that needless war was proved disastrously wrong.

But The Gadfly is not hear to gloat about it. No, the actual motive for this post is that on the heels of the events going on in Iraq this past week, the same cadre of conservative snakes and worms and creepy crawlies has slithered out from under the slimy rocks, where they normally reside, and re-inserted themselves and their brain dead foreign policy views in to the public discourse once again.

And what is especially galling to The Gadfly is that these assholes and pathological liars actually have the nerve to question Obama's (so far) measured response to the wholly broken situation that is Iraq at this time, and are upset that he is not sending our Air Force boys and toys in there to bomb the place further back in to the stone age -- more than what we already have done with our 10 years of fuckuppery flailing about.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow took note of the sad fact that the mainstream media and tv and cable news shows have been trotting out the utterly wrong and utterly failed Iraq war architects to opine on the current situation in Iraq, as well as the Benghazi flim-flammery:

Frankly, anybody who puts an ounce of credence into a single opinion that the Iraq war creators and supporters have to say on the current situation in Iraq is a goddamn fool - pure and simple. And if this past week is any indication, it appears that there are many fools running the news rooms of many major news organizations across America.

The best thing Americans can do is to just turn off these news shows. Stop buying the major news papers.

And more than anything, stop believing that your news media is trustworthy and honorable. Once you accept the fact that they are anything but that -- you most definitely will be better informed just by virtue of the fact that you aren't buying into their bullshit lies and misinformation any more. So do yourselves a favor and ditch the mainstream news media and search for alternative sources that aren't beholden to corporate and ideological interests.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Citing dismay with an educational system that is “censoring” science, a non-profit group in Boise, Idaho, has opened up a creationist museum hoping to present a “biblical perspective and a naturalistic perspective.”

According to the Idaho Statesman, the fledgling Northwest Science Museum has opened up a “Vision House,” located next to a store that sells Magic the Gathering and other gaming supplies, with hopes to someday move to a 450,000 square feet facility where they can display a full-sized replica of Noah’s ark.

Speaking to a group of children, a volunteer curator agrees with “skeptics” who question how Noah could have brought dinosaurs upon his ark.

“But yet they found a baby diploducus in Argentina — a complete skeleton, 27-inches long,” he explained. ” Noah, being the smart man he was … he’s going to bring a baby or young one along that’s gonna live longer, reproduce a lot more.”

Umm - yeah, because if there is anything that is going to prepare American youth for the technological and scientific challenges of the 21st century and beyond, it is the fundamentalist religious people teaching them that humans and dinosaurs coexisted on the planet and that around 6000 or so years ago, some poor shlub named Noah gathered a baby of each dinosaur species that ever existed, tossed them on to his ginormous wooden cargo carrier along with the rest of the known critters of the earth, and floundered about for several months on a planet that had been entirely flooded by his angry master, Yahweh -- and teaching it all as FACT!

It is not, in any sense of the matter, a stretch of The Gadfly's imagination when he says that these people actually believe that the following picture resembles their version of reality as to what the world looked like like in the early days of human existence:

[ click to enlarge ]

Jeebus -- forgive them -- for they know not what degree of harm that they do to the prospects for the advancement, much less survival, of the human species . . . . . . . .

The man accused of shooting two law enforcement members in California, including a Bureau of Land Management ranger, has had at least one previous run-in with law enforcement and has described himself as the target of a massive government conspiracy.

Brent Douglas Cole, 60, was named by the Nevada County Sheriff's Office on Monday as the suspect in Saturday's shooting that also left him wounded.

Anna Ferguson, assistant district attorney for Nevada County, confirmed to TPM that Cole was also facing misdemeanor charges in Nevada County Superior Court for allegedly carrying a loaded firearm. He was charged on Jan. 26.

These fucking NRA ammosexuals are out of control - period. End of discussion.

It almost has The Gadfly hoping that they do instigate another attack on the government, you know, something along the lines of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Because if there is anything that will further the cause of the gun goons and illicit empathy and sympathy from ALL Americans, it would be the vision of seeing this scene plastered all over the mainstream media and the internet again as a stark reminder as to what the government hating, radical right gun crowd is truly all about:

That is a photo of an Oklahoma City fireman gently carrying a maimed, bloodied and dying toddler away from the rubble of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building on April 19, 1995 after some right wing, white bred, anti-government militia nuts set off a bomb outside the building. The blast killed 169 Americans, including 19 babies and toddlers in a daycare center on the first floor of the building.

So yeah -- let the revolution begin gun goons. Fly your insipid little "Don't Tread on Me" flags proudly as you cowardly slay unsuspecting men, women and babies with car bombs while you yourselves make your getaway a safe distance from the death and carnage you inflict. You all are so cocksure of your cause and your beliefs and that it will inspire the rest of America to flock to your side and take up arms with you? -- so what the fuck are you waiting for?? Let the hostilities begin!!

If you cannot deduce it, The Gadfly is just simply fucking sick and goddamn tired of these people and their arrogant cretinism. To stand by silently while they turn this country into a lawless, violence infused, third world shithole, implies complicity. As George W. Bush once famously put it to his fellow Americans when speaking about his administration's efforts to combat another group of terrorists -- "you're either with us or against us."

The Gadfly would have to concur with that sentiment as it pertains to combating the idiocy of these gun fetishists and their political enablers. Time to start choosing sides and even more importantly, make your choice known and follow through on it by supporting those who are working toward sending these assholes back to the political fringe and fever swamp of societal isolation where they belong.

The Gadfly has finally gotten a reprieve in his on-going work/business ventures and as such, it is time to get caught up on a few things. So let's not waste any time . . . . .

[ click to enlarge ]

First up -- this is why this country cannot have nice things:

JUNE 16, 2014, 1:59 PM EDT

"Folks, I need you all to go inside," an officer can be heard telling onlookers at one point. "If that gun is live and he starts firing, everyone is at risk."

Houseman refused to comply with requests that he put the rifle down and talk to the officers. During the negotiations, Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety Lt. Stacey Geik, who took over as commanding officer on the scene, told a dispatcher that Houseman was "exercising his open carry rights, however, he has certainly overextended them at this point."

There was also talk of revolution, and gun rights, and even remorse. According to MLive.com, he was eventually convinced to put down the gun.

After Houseman had turned over the rifle, he and Geik continued to talk, because Houseman wanted to get his gun back.

"But you're not stable mentally, which now takes you away from that rifle," Geik said, according to MLive.com.

"I'm not stable mentally? How do you decide that?" Houseman said.

"You're damn right," the lieutenant said. "How did this happen with open carry? What are you supposed to do when you contact law enforcement? Do you say, 'I hate you mother(expletive), (expletive) you? I hate you, there's a revolution coming.' Do you say that? Is that what you're taught?"

"It was wrong of me," Houseman said.

The rifle was returned to him the next day, and police decided against seeking a misdemeanor charge of brandishing a firearm.

An old white guy is strolling up and down the street of his Kalamazoo, Michigan neighborhood, waving an assault rifle around and shouting about "revolution" and "gun rights." Keep in mind, this event is just days fresh on the heels of a couple of anti-government gun nuts in Nevada walking in to a restaurant in Las Vegas where a couple of LVPD cops were on their lunch break, and having caught them off guard - (because who goes to lunch thinking you might be executed at any moment?), unceremoniously put bullets in to the backs of their heads execution style, then drape the Tea Party flag (Don't Tread on Me) over the officer's fresh corpses all the while screaming about the start of the revolution.

Ok - so this obviously unhinged, assault rifle toting oldwhite guy gets the attention of neighbors and passerby who all, and rightly so, concernedly contact and report it to the police. The cops show up, wherein the old white guy starts screaming at, insulting and verbally threatening the cops. After about an hour of negotiations, the cops finally convince the old white guy that he's in the wrong and get him to surrender and hand over his rifle. There is video at the link if you care to watch and have your blood pressure raised.

So anyhow - the cops, even after telling the old white guy that they believed him to be "mentally unstable," subsequently release him with no charges and return his assault weapon to him the very next day.

That was mighty white of the Kalamazoo PD to accord the old white guy such accommodating deference, dontcha think dear readers?

Alright -- there is a reason that The Gadfly repeatedly employed the term "old white guy" in his summary of this story above here dear readers in addition to highlighting and underscoring it. Many of you can probably guess where this is headed.

Replace the term "old white guy" with "young black man" or "young hispanic man" in this scenario.

Any of you dear readers care to speculate as to whether or not the Kalamazoo PD might have handled that situation a bit differently had the suspect been a African-America or Hispanic man waving an assault rifle around on a public street and ranting about revolution and such?? Hell -- it doesn't even have to be a young black or hispanic -- make it an old man if it makes you feel any better -- the question still stands.

. . . . . ♫♫♫ ...Crickets Chirping... ♫♫♫ . . . . .

Yeah -- that's what The Gadfly thought.

The day that The Gadfly begins seeing conservatives demanding equal law enforcement treatment, like the kind that the loony old white guy in this case received, for minorities - that is the day that The Gadfly will reconsider his unbending stance of just not giving a shit whatsoever what conservatives think and believe these days.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

The Gadfly is neck deep in a new work venture, but fear not, his triumphant return to the pages of this shitty little blog are in the making . . . . patience dear readers, for The Gadfly has a lot of lost time to make up for and his mind is boiling cauldron of barely controlled rage on a myriad of topical subjects from this past week or so.

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Gadfly has his own feline . . . ummm, child . . . . 10 year old male alley cat who thinks he's a human baby who's daddy just so happens to be The Gadfly . ... . . . Gadfly's wife can't stand this bastard child and she ignores him like the plague --- and so he screams like a banshee when The Gadfly is away from home for more than a half a day . . . Guess The Gadfly shouldn't have let him crawl on his bare chest with kitty treats when he was a kitten .......

Anyhow -- Gadfly loves him some doggies, but cats are his favorite pet just because they're so goddamn independent, nonjudgmental and conditionally loyal ... reminds The Gadfly of his self.

Therefore, on the 30.000th hit, The Gadfly shall perform a death defying feat ...............[to be named at a later date ], but until that death defying feat, The Gadfly would like to share this with his undying fans ......

Behavior The Gadfly, in his most slightly inebriated state, could most certainly appreciate and admire.

Gaze upon the behavior of your loving, fair-minded, decent, teabagging, right wing bullies in all of their hateful glory, upon hearing that the town where Bowe Bergdahl was born and raised and where his family resides, was planning a homecoming celebration for him:

In Hailey, Idaho, the hometown of freed U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl, the joy at his release has turned for some into shock and fear — the fear of picking up the phone.

That's because some town officials have been deluged with angry calls from people who think that Bergdahl is an Army deserter or traitor who doesn't deserve a hero's welcome.

Jane Drussel, the president of the Hailey Chamber of Commerce, has been fielding dozens of angry calls.

"Well, (I feel) disappointment number one, just absolutely total surprise at how bad some of them are," she told NBC News on Tuesday.

"(We're) really surprised at the people who are calling — they are hate calls, they’re not just people voicing an opinion," she said. "The girls just don’t even... we’re all just absolutely in shock, we don’t know how to respond to that to tell you quite truthfully."

"I just find that shocking," she said. "You know, we’re Americans, and we need to act like Americans, and to me that’s un-American. Let things play out, and if there needs to be action taken, I’m sure it will be taken. But that’s not the city of Hailey’s responsibility."

The Gadfly simply cannot fathom how anyone of sane mind and sound manner could ever associate, empathize or support these fucking hateful bastards. It just doesn't compute in The Gadfly's mind as to why anyone would want to be around such contemptible and execrably immoral people. And yet they have the nerve still to lay claim to Jesus Christ as solely THEIR very own rightfully inherited savior?

The Gadfly is certain that were the son of Yahweh to return today and see these people for what they have become and how they have so perverted and misused Jesus' teachings, he'd give them all bus tickets that were one-way punched for a trip to the Gehenna Resort.

Another of history's right wing deceitful losers weighs in on the Bowe Bergdahl story:

JUNE 4, 2014, 10:21 AM EDT

Naturally, Lt. Col. Oliver North has plenty to say about the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

North, the former Reagan aide-turned-conservative commentator best-known for his central role in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, was on a mission Tuesday to hand down his indictment of the prisoner swap that secured Bergdahl's rescue.

Speaking to former Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ) on his Newsmax program, North demanded to know if a ransom was paid to terrorists in order to execute the swap.

“Was there a ransom paid?" North said. "Did the government of the United States, either directly or indirectly, finance a terrorist organization?”

Hey -- if anyone could be considered a subject matter expert on the act of paying ransom to mid-east terrorists for American hostages, it's good ol' Ollie North.

This fucker illegally sold WMD's to Iran back in the early 80's to secure release of the American hostages then being held by Islamic radicals. Oh - but it didn't stop there. He then helped to orchestrate the funneling of the illegal Iranian WMD money to right wing death squad Contras down in Nicaragua who were fighting a brutal and vicious war against civilians who were trying to elect a leftist government - Congress had passed a law barring any funding of those murderers. Thankfully he had St. Ronaldus Magnus Reagan and friends to cover up and whitewash his crimes. Republican independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, who investigated the whole thing from beginning to magnanimous end, labeled the Reagan administration coverup as one of the greatest political and criminal whitewash jobs of all time, and ol' Ollie was smack dab in the middle of it all:

For Walsh, a lifelong Republican who shared the foreign policy views of the Reagan administration, the Iran-contra experience was a life-changing one, as his investigation penetrated one wall of lies only to be confronted with another and another -- and not just lies from Oliver North and his cohorts but lies from nearly every senior administration official who spoke with investigators.

According to Firewall, the cover-up conspiracy took formal shape at a meeting of Reagan and his top advisers in the Situation Room at the White House on Nov. 24, 1986. The meeting's principal point of concern was how to handle the troublesome fact that Reagan had approved illegal arms sales to Iran in fall 1985, before any covert-action finding had been signed. The act was a clear felony -- a violation of the Arms Export Control Act -- and possibly an impeachable offense.

Amid recent reports that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is having difficulty speaking English after spending five years in Taliban captivity, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin doubled down on her criticism of the newly freed prisoner of war's anti-Americanism.

“Sympathizers now tell the media Bergdahl can't be held to account anytime soon because he can't be interviewed ... claiming he's forgotten how to speak English. Really?” Palin asked in a Facebook post Wednesday. “Then # Call 1-800-RosettaStone.”

Whilst begging pardon from the decent ladies out there, The Gadfly just simply must make note of the fact that Sarah Palin truly is one insufferably obnoxious cunt.

And yes - The Gadfly is willing to take his lumps for using that vulgar term to refer to a woman, because the woman, in this case whom it is targeted at, truly is the epitome of that word.

Besides -- it's all John McCain's fault. If he hadn't allowed himself to be cowed by the religious fundamentalist wingnuts in to selecting this repulsive woman as his running mate in 2008, we probably wouldn't be having this unpleasant conversation to fucking begin with. So thanks McCain - you dick - oops - there goes The Gadfly again with his vulgar language . . . . . sigh . . . . . .

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Another blogger with the moral courage to tell it straight about the conservative douchebag's hypocritical whining about the Obama administration's efforts to extract captured Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl from the clutches of the Taliban. Here's the question he poses to those on the right who are throwing tantrums over this issue:

Are we now so filled with foul bilious hatred, are we now so consumed with soul-destroying fear, do we now despise our own selves so much that we would actually protest the return of one of our own? Is that it?

Is that what we’ve become?

If so, then the sooner America collapses of its own maggot-ridden gangrenous rot, the better.

It was really only a matter of time before conservatives began invoking the "I-word" over President Obama's decision to release five Taliban detainees from the detention center at Guantanamo Bay in exchange for the only American prisoner of war in Afghanistan.

In the days following the prisoner swap that secured the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, some conservatives who have long fantasized about booting Obama from office believe they may finally have the goods for impeachment.

Andrew McCarthy, who's written an entire book that builds a case for impeachment against Obama, said in an interview published Monday he would include the Bergdahl release as part of his "larger indictment" against the President.

McCarthy told the Mail Online that the release of "senior terrorists to the Taliban" represents a "high crime and misdemeanor."

Please, oh, please, oh please do it! The Gadfly would be entertained to no end watching conservatives trying to hard sell yet another impeachment attempt of a popularly elected Democratic President to the American people, based on nothing more than the political ratfucking, wet-dream fantasies of the wingnut crowd. Hell - it worked so well with Clinton dontcha' know?

It would be the beginning of the end of the modern-day conservative movement and The Gadfly will be damned if that outcome wouldn't be the most wonderful thing to happen to this country in a very, very long time.

Honestly -- what more evidence is needed for people to see just how batshit insane the conservative movement, and by proxy it's wholly owned subsidiary, the Republican Party, has become?

The hosts of Fox & Friends on Tuesday lashed out at the White House for allowing the family of returning prisoner of war, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, to speak alongside President Barack Obama because the father looked "like a member of the Taliban" due to a beard he had been growing in support of his son.

From the president's announcement on Saturday through Monday night, Fox News hadfocused on calling Bowe Bergdahl a "deserter" who was not worthy of the prisoner swap negotiated by the U.S. government.

But on Tuesday morning, the network also began to trash the soldier's parents.

It truly does drill a Lincoln Tunnel sized hole straight in to the core of the phoniness and fraudulence that is the sum total of what little remnants that there are of the soul of the conservative movement. That is the level of dickheaded asininity that has come to exemplify the right's public behavior these days..

It has evolved to the point that they just simply need to be viciously laughed at and derided every time they open their fucking pieholes now --- and The Gadfly is just the the right man for the job --- for The Gadfly long ago figured out who and what these asshole losers are and isn't intimidated by their ignorant bullshit and their amateurish mind games. Plus - The Gadfly expended the last little bit of empathy, compassion and understanding that he had for these fuckers when it became clear that they were happily throwing their lot in with the racist, misogynist, ass-backward thinking, hateful Teabaggers.

For The Gadfly - it has become an all out mission to destroy them and their movement at this point - with no regrets and an unbending sense of virtuous purpose to the task at hand.